A friend's Core 2 Duo computer that had an Asus motherboard had the PCIe slot fail. So we had to buy what was available; an Intel micro ATX motherboard. He is running WinXP, and the reinstall won't work -- it keeps going back to the beginning of the reinstallation.

So, what would be the best way to get WinXP up and running -- a reformat is not really an option, and we'd like to not have to reinstall all the programs. Should we do a "fresh" installation and risk the dual boot confusion, or can I delete the old Windows folder and still have program installed and running after all is said and done?

You can quite easily get rid of this by editing the hidden 'ntldr' or something file on the root of the installation drive. I'd go this root if you really have to reinstall Windows.

Why does Windows need to be reinstalled as such? Does it no longer start up properly given the huge upheaval of a motherboard swap? Does safe mode work at all? If you can get into safe mode then you could try Drivercleaner to get rid of the leftover drivers from the old motherboard. That might then allow it to boot normally.

You might also want to have a look at some LiveCD's. Some of them offer many more tools than Windows repair to get a system working again.

It seems that the new motherboard could not handle the SATA hard drive on the first reboot. We could not find the "F6 SCSI driver" for this motherboard, and it didn't come with a actual driver disk; just a CD-R that they had pulled together. We got it up and running (sort of) by using an IDE/PATA hard drive, although now it will not do *any* Windows Updates and IE crashes, and after installing Eset Smart Security, the desktop takes *forever* to start working...

This is a refurbished/leftover motherboard, and it shows. There are not very many S775 motherboards left on sale, and so we are struggling to get this machine back on it's feet, as it were.

If you at some point did a repair install you may have a mixed up service pack and/or IE version. Install the latest SP and then IE from the full installers. Download them on another PC and USB/Network them over.

I downloaded the self-installing WinXP SP3 and IE8 and two other recommended security updates, burned a CD-R and they installed on the rebuilt system without a hitch.

Afterward, all the Microsoft Updates installed properly.

The fly in the ointment is that now Eset Smart Security 5 bungs up the Internet. It warns us that the online filter is corrupted and not working, and we then can no longer get online at all. Sigh... Any thoughts on this?

I'm going to clone the IDE drive onto the SATA drive after everything is installed, and then we'll disconnect the IDE drive and save it as a safe bootable drive, for our friend Justin Case.

The fly in the ointment is that now Eset Smart Security 5 bungs up the Internet. It warns us that the online filter is corrupted and not working, and we then can no longer get online at all. Sigh... Any thoughts on this?

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